The Grio — When I was a child, my mother recognized that the public school system was never going to give me an adequate education in the area of Black history, so in order to fill in the gaps we frequented the library and she made sure I read more than what I was assigned in class. Knowing of my history and pride in my culture was instilled at a very early age.

But as “Black and proud” as we were, one thing my family has never done is celebrate Kwanzaa. As a matter off fact, my immediate and extended family has largely dismissed and derided the “celebration of family, community, and culture” often joking that it is not a “real” holiday and referring to it, mockingly, as “Black Christmas.” For a long time, I encountered this sentiment in nearly every Black person I knew.

I didn’t understand why, and that can be attributed to my ignorance regarding what Kwanzaa actually was. I knew it was a holiday, I knew it lasted seven days, I knew it started after Christmas, and I knew it had something to do with Black people. Outside of that . . . nothing.

Created in 1966 by professor and activist Dr. Maulana (Ron) Karenga, Kwanzaa is an outgrowth of the Black nationalist politics of the 1960s, where people of African descent living in the United States began to assert their rights to humanity, and further, the right to ownership over their culture and communities.

Black nationalism taught us to reject that which was imposed on us by mainstream (read: White) cultural institutions and build our own institutions that reflected our voices, values, and heritage. Kwanzaa was born of this thinking and is meant to “serve as a regular communal celebration which reaffirmed and reinforced the bonds between us as a people in the U.S., in the Diaspora and on the African continent, in a word, as a world African community.”

Even as it has gained in popularity, Kwanzaa still isn’t an enormously popular tradition among the constituency for which it was intended. There are no official statistics on how many people celebrate the holiday, thought I’ve seen numbers of ranging from 2 percent of African-Americans to 30 million people worldwide. I personally know more people who celebrate it at this stage of my life, but all of them espouse or possess an intimate knowledge of Black nationalist ideas.

E. Franklin Frazier’s “black bourgeiosie”, or the so-called Black middle-class, or those possessing a more mainstream, less “radical” political and cultural ideology, have not embraced Kwanzaa. For many, the idea of Kwanzaa is connected to the idea of Black people wanting to have something to call their own and haphazardly throwing together something that resembles a mythical, romanticized “Africa” and subsequent identity, but lacks any real purpose, message, or foundation. Whether a case of elitism or assimilation, Kwanzaa garners little respect from the keepers of black middle-class values.

i do and my family does for about 15 years nowi am pretty sure it was invented in the late 60’s. I honestly feel like most Black Americans dont celebrate this because White America does not.

ericka

@jewel….i agree!!!!!!!!!!!! seems like more of us make fun of it than support it.

AJ

I recognize the 7 principles because this is how I try to live my life everyday. But it doesn’t go further than that. I like what the holiday stands for collectively and I see it as something to promote black pride. But I kinda think it’s a joke unless you make it a year long commitment.